Various means have been used in prior art to provide for detonation of a high explosive. Prior art explosive detonators generally utilize an impact type primer or an electrically activated primer to initiate a lead azide train or a pyrotechnic delay train to ignite a booster charge and in turn to fire the main high explosive charge. One problem with these prior art devices was that the primer-lead azide train-detonator size requirements were frequently too large to be accommodated within the space limitations imposed by fuzes. The problem of space limitation is particularly vexing in applications where the munition has a plurality of sub-munitions contained therein. Another problem with the abovementioned prior art detonators was that they frequently were unreliable and unsafe because of their sensitivity to stray electrical currents, the failure of any one of a multitudinous of electrical connections, failure in movement or function of an essential part because of the influence of a high acceleration environment, or a failure due to contamination or corrosion caused by loss of hermeticity.